A few nights ago a friend from home called to catch up. She’d just come back from a three week trip in Southeast Asia and was met with news of not one but two engagements of her closest friends. In a week she would travel again to Canada to cheer her husband on in his Ironman, and after that, enjoy the three weeks left of summer vacation, courtesy of her Master’s program, to which, summer plans all said and done, she was looking forward to returning. Continue reading “Tuesday”→

A few weeks ago a coworker and I headed back to the office together after an offsite meeting.

His name was Hemingway*, after the writer he said, but his livelihood was in film. The short, thirty second variety – TV Commercials – TVCs or “spots,” as the industry has designated. He was an accomplished but not quite famous freelance director. Continue reading “A Conversation With Hemingway*”→

I didn’t date until I was 25, mostly because my years before were filled with crushes on celebrities and fictional characters ranging from Edward Norton to Anime cartoons. I’ve come a long way…I think, except for the moments during certain arguments with Tom, when I backtrack and think, “If Tom and I are meant for each other, why are we having another argument about _(insert topic here, involving anything from domestic inanities to personal values).”

Because, as Botton points out, very few people are “meant” for each other.

“…for most of us, our life’s problem isn’t finding a partner (that’s just one very important and at points thrilling phase), it is tolerating the candidate one eventually finds, and being tolerated by them, over time.

“A wiser culture than ours would recognize that the start of a relationship is not the high point that romantic art assumes; it is merely the first step of a far longer, more ambivalent and yet quietly audacious journey on which we should direct our intelligence and scrutiny.”

Makes sense to me, which is why I like Botton and why I’m marking my calendar to preorder his new book, an un-Romantic novel, The Course of Love, out on June 14th.